Building on a Firm Foundation: Readers’ Advisory over the Next Twenty-Five Years

Readers’ Advisory in the Academic Library

In her article “Academic Libraries and Extracurricular Reading Promotion,” Julie Elliott makes a persuasive case for the reintroduction of readers’ advisory services to the academic library world.⁶ In her piece, Elliott notes the history of what she calls “extracurricular reading” in academic settings and the role that academic libraries once played in providing not only materials but guidance for student readers. As Elliott points out, there are many compelling reasons for academic librarians to embrace the role of readers’ advisors for their reading community and to reverse the decline in support of extracurricular reading that began in the second half of the twentieth century. While many schools have incorporated some form of campus-wide reading program, there are many other opportunities for academic libraries to build a community of readers on campus. Opportunities also exist for academic libraries to partner with local public libraries in supporting extracurricular reading. The question of the future of reference service is a topic of much discussion in the academic library world, and many of the participants in this debate predict that reference service may be less and less important in the future. Readers’ advisory services offer academic libraries the opportunity to expand their contact with readers in their university community and to attract new users into the library. Implementing or expanding support of extracurricular reading in academic libraries will face challenges in terms of budgeting for reading materials not related to courses and in terms of RA training for staff. But, as Elliott notes, “Probably the best reason to keep finding ways to promote recreational reading in the college library is to be able to witness those moments when the students connect with their reading.”⁷

Library 2.0 and RA

There has been a great deal of discussion in the library community about the concepts that are generally referred to as “Library 2.0” or “Web 2.0.” These concepts center around the idea of user-focused service and using technology to create and develop user communities. This is what readers’ advisory has always been about: first, listening to individual readers and making suggestions for them on the basis of their reading interests; and second, building a community of readers. Given that readers’ advisors have been “2.0” for a long time, the challenge remains how best to incorporate new technologies into our current practice. Blogs and wikis offer advisors the opportunity to reach out to users in new ways, and perhaps to reach a new set of users for whom visiting the physical library is not convenient or possible. There are many libraries currently experimenting with these technologies. Online book discussions and reading groups also have been developing.⁸ Libraries are looking at ways to make their catalogs more useful to readers by incorporating data from sites such as LibraryThing or enabling users to comment and tag titles in the catalog. Some libraries have been experimenting with online, form-based readers’ advisory services.⁹ All of these tools offer libraries the chance to improve the services to their reading community as well as the chance to expand that community. Challenges do exist here though. Advisors now have competition from services such as LibraryThing, Shelfari, GoodReads, and Literature Map that offer themselves as sources for readalikes. Readers’ advisors also need to consider how best to blend the concepts of appeal, which have been developed over the past twenty years, with the idea of readers tagging books with their own headings. This idea of folksonomy as opposed to taxonomy offers readers’ advisors ways to discover more about how readers describe their own reading interests, but at the same time presents a variety of challenges, particularly to the quality of tagging. One of the biggest challenges facing advisors in the Library 2.0 age will be maintaining the human touch that is so central to readers’ advisory services.

Defining Terms

As noted above, the concepts of appeal as applied by readers’ advisors were developed by Saricks and Brown in the late 1980s. Over the past twenty years, these concepts have for the most part remained fairly constant. Recently though, as Neal Wyatt points out, “The concept of appeal is … being changed and adapted by those who helped to create it and by a new group of librarians eager to help develop new thinking about how patrons react to, and interact with, what they read.”¹⁰ As librarians learn more about how readers respond to books though discussion and through analysis of reader tagging of titles and authors, readers’ advisory practice needs to incorporate these new concepts into its vocabulary of appeal. The expansion of readers’ advisory services in the area of narrative nonfiction also necessitates a re-examination of appeal to see how we can best translate these concepts from fiction to nonfiction writing. Although there has been discussion over the years of developing a controlled vocabulary of appeal, in the days of user tagging it may be more reasonable to look at how best to incorporate reader-developed concepts of what a book is into our discussion of appeal. As libraries develop their own book blogs and continue to write reviews for the public, and as librarians add tags to blogs or catalog records, an opportunity exists to help readers make better choices in terms of tagging vocabulary. The evolution of the elements of appeal will be essential to the ability of readers’ advisors to provide the reading community with reading suggestions that are thoughtful and appropriate.

Reaching Readers

Although the past quarter century has seen great strides in the development of RA tools and in the codification of RA practice, the marketing of RA services still lags behind our practice. When asked, few librarians express the feeling that they get as many RA questions as they would like. Frequently, RA services, like ILL services, seem to be serving a small, though dedicated and thankful, portion of the library’s reading community. Reference librarians have long lamented the challenge of working with users who “hate to bother you with my question.” A similar problem exists in the readers’ advisory world, where too often readers are reluctant to come to the librarian seeking reading suggestions. There are many reasons why this may be so, and some of them are beyond the direct control of the library. However, there are a variety of areas where libraries and readers’ advisors could expand their reach into their reading communities. As libraries increasingly are moving away from static reference desks in favor of reaching users in the stacks, readers’ advisors can take a similar approach and not simply wait for readers to come to the desk to ask for assistance. Technology allows readers’ advisory to expand beyond the walls of the library in a variety of ways, but again the marketing of these services is crucial to their success. It is also essential that these tools be easy for readers to use. The more complicated it is to use library resources, the more likely that readers who are pressed for time are going to look for other resources to get the reading suggestions that they are seeking. In 1931, S. R. Ranganathan proposed his Five Laws of Library Science, the fourth of which was to “save the time of the reader.”¹¹ As more and more readers feel time pressures that limit their ability to take advantage of traditional readers’ advisory services, advisors need to explore new avenues for reaching these readers in order to maintain the library’s role in the community of readers.

Quantifying RA Practice

While readers’ advisory practice has and continues to develop in positive ways, there has been a lag in the development of ways to quantify what we are achieving as readers’ advisors. In part, this is because the readers’ advisory encounter is hard to measure. While a tick on a transaction log indicates that there has been an interaction between a reader and a librarian, there are many other aspects to the readers’ advisory encounter that are not tracked. In order to make an argument for the value of RA services to the library and the community as library budgets continue to tighten, it will be important to look for more ways to quantify what readers’ advisory brings to the library. Anecdotal evidence is fine, but it is not enough. Advisors should look for ways to assess the impact of their work on library circulation, for instance calculating what percentage of circulation of materials comes from book displays. Creating links from the library catalog to RA resources online will allow libraries to measure how often users access those resources from the catalog. In looking at developing statistical measures for RA services, it is important to look at the entire range of service offered, not just the direct, one-on-one encounter between the reader and the advisor. Book displays, book discussion groups, author visits, outreach services, reading lists, book blogs, and all other means of connecting readers with materials should somehow be included in the measurement of RA services. Not only will this sort of data strengthen the position of RA services in the quest for support, it also creates for readers’ advisors benchmark levels that allow them to assess the success or lack of success for particular programs.

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